Don't Even Wait a Little While
by nicalyse
Summary: It isn't the first time that he's said he wants to marry her, not by a long shot. One-shot.


**A/N:** This is the second of my Twelve 'Ships of Christmas. Each story stands alone, and each story features a different _Glee_ ship. Writing from Tina's perspective is brand new to me, as is Puck/Tina as a ship, so I'd love to hear what you think!

* * *

><p>"Would you just let me open it already?"<p>

Tina lowers the jar of sun-dried tomatoes that she's trying to open so she can glare at Puck. "I can do it," she insists, ignoring the way that he rolls his eyes at her. She wipes each of her hands on the front of her jeans, then tries again, twisting hard with her left hand and baring her teeth. She opened her own jars for years, and just because there's a guy around who can do it doesn't mean that she's going to start relying on him.

"Ha!" she crows when she seal pops. She sets the jar on the counter next to Puck's cutting board with a flourish. "I told you I could do it."

Puck fishes a few tomatoes out of the jar and puts them on his board. "I should know by now not to doubt you," he teases.

"Damn straight," Tina agrees, boosting herself up to sit on the counter and picking up her wine glass.

He's teasing her about it now, but Puck knows as well as anyone that Tina doesn't need anyone's help. She doesn't _need_ anyone. It took a year of dating followed by two years of convincing for her to even agree to live together, and he hasn't exactly been subtle about the fact that he'd like to get married sooner rather than later. She gives him credit though; he knows her well enough not to spring a proposal on her before she's ready.

There's a rational part of her that knows that his awareness of her, that he can tell that she isn't ready, should be reason enough to marry him, but rationality doesn't always triumph. For example, when the thought of wearing a ring on her left hand for any reason other than _it's pretty_ sends her into a panic, her body going hot all over and her breathing getting shallow. Even knowing, with absolute certainty, that there isn't another person who will love her, who will _know_ her the way that Puck does isn't enough to get her past her fear and make her say yes.

She knows that he believes that she'll come around eventually. She tries not to worry about it, but she does wonder sometimes just how long he'll be willing to wait.

"Taste," Puck orders, holding up a bite of the pasta he's preparing for dinner. She rests her fingers lightly on his when he brings the wooden spoon to her lips, letting out a little hum when the creamy sauce hits her tongue, the acidity of the tomato cutting through the richness. "Good?"

"Really good," she confirms, licking her lips. "A little more pepper would make it better."

He shakes his head even as he's reaching for the pepper mill. "You think everything needs more pepper."

"Everything does need more pepper." She winks at him over the rim of her wine glass.

* * *

><p>Tina moved to St. Louis after college when she got a job at this enormous biochemical corporation expecting to start her life over again from scratch. Most of her friends from college were staying around Boston, or at least somewhere on the east coast, and she'd lost track of nearly everyone from high school. But that was okay. She'd started over again when she went to college, and she wasn't the shy little girl that she'd been back at the beginning of high school.<p>

She'd gotten a little apartment in the Central West End in a nice building just around the corner from a cupcake shop and a few really great bars. She made friends with the couple who lived next door, Gavin and Andrew, and she started hanging out with one of the girls that she worked with, Anne Marie. It didn't feel like it took long to build a life in the city, with friends and her career.

She ran into Puck at a bar downtown when she was out celebrating a friend's birthday. It was almost surreal, seeing someone from Lima at that point in her life, but Puck looked good and was as charming as he'd ever been, so she didn't think about it too much. They'd taken a shot together and exchanged phone numbers, but she hadn't expected to hear from him again. She'd been wrong. It turned out that as an adult, Puck was more the kind of guy she was interested in spending time with than he had been as a teenager.

A year later, he was telling her that he didn't care if she didn't want to be his girlfriend officially, but he was done pretending that he wasn't as serious about her as he was. It took her two weeks to finally use the word boyfriend, but at the end of the day, she figured that if he was willing to commit to her, she owed to him to do the same.

He works in management at the Scottrade Center, which, for all intents and purposes, means that he can get anyone tickets to hockey games and the other events that are hosted there. Occasionally, it means that he spends a late night at the arena overseeing something. It doesn't bother her too much. Of course she'd rather spend time with her boyfriend than not, but she's more than capable of entertaining herself for an evening. She does like to wait up for him though. It's probably silly, but she feels weird falling asleep without saying good night to Puck.

She's waiting up for him in bed on one of those nights, half-watching a _Friends_ rerun and trying not to doze off before he gets home. She's tired, and she has to be up early the next morning, but she's determined to stay awake until Puck comes in.

She fails, a little. Even though she would normally have heard him come into the apartment, she doesn't realize that he's home until he's in their bedroom, taking off his watch and putting it on top of the dresser with his wallet and the rest of the things in his pockets. "Hey," she greets sleepily.

He turns to face her, unbuttoning his shirt. "You didn't have to wait up," he says. It isn't the first time.

She shakes her head. "Of course I did." She pushes herself up a little. "How was work?"

"Same old," he answers, pushing his pants off his hips. "You?"

"Your mom called me today," she says instead of answering him. Puck rolls his eyes. "She was due for a _'when are you going to make my son an honest man?'_ call."

Puck shakes his head, but he's smiling fondly. He loves his mom, she knows (and Tina loves her, too, even if she's a bit on the pushy side), and he's totally on board with her desire for Puck and Tina to get married. "You know I didn't put her up to that," he reminds her, slipping into bed beside her.

She moves closer to him, sliding her hand across his bare chest and tipping her head back so she can kiss him. "I know."

He kisses her again, sipping at her lips. "She's not wrong though," he murmurs.

There it is.

Tina just hums against his lips, then pushes him onto his back and straddles his hips, pulling her nightgown over her head and dropping it off the side of the bed.

She asked him once if it bothered him that she used sex to avoid having this particular conversation. She still laughs when she thinks about the expression that crossed his face.

* * *

><p>Dating wasn't always easy for Tina.<p>

To be perfectly honest, Mike Chang nearly ruined men for her. He wasn't her first boyfriend, but he was her first everything else, including her first love. Finding another guy who was that attentive, who was that loving, who was willing to take the time to really get to _know_ her the way that Mike did seemed impossible.

Dating in college was less about going on dates and trying to build relationships than it was about finding someone she was compatible with sexually with whom she was willing to spend more than ten minutes at a time. Friends-with-benefits was invented for Tina, though her experiences tended to be light on the friendship and heavy on the benefits. It didn't change too much after she graduated and moved to St. Louis, though her new 'friends' tended to live in nicer apartments than the old ones had.

Learning that Noah Puckerman could rival Mike Chang in the boyfriend department had been...well, at first it was disconcerting. It went against everything she'd ever known about him. She'd even tried to explain it away, to say that it was all just circumstances coming together to make Puck look better than he really was. But he brought her homemade soup when she was sick, and he sat for her dog, Oscar, when she had to go to Chicago for the weekend for work, and it was hard to deny that he cared.

Then, of course, was that little fluttering that she got in her stomach for just a moment every time she saw him that was getting harder and harder to ignore.

She still gets that little flutter every now and again. Sometimes it's something simple that sets it off, like Puck bringing her a cup of coffee made just the way she likes it (with three teaspoons of amaretto-flavored non-dairy creamer, even though she knows the stuff is terrible), or hearing him shuffling around in the dark in their bedroom in the morning in an effort not to wake her.

Tonight, it's the way that he sets his hand lightly on the small of her back when he leads her into the restaurant where his office Christmas party is being held. He winks when she smiles over her shoulder at him, and even though they've only just arrived, she can't wait to get him back home.

Tina loves her job, but Puck's work things tend to be more fun than hers simply because, as a rule, sports people aren't as dry as scientists. (Interestingly, scientists do tend to have better liquor at their parties, so she supposes it all evens out.) Since she's been coming to work functions with Puck for nearly five years, she's friendly with some of his co-workers and their families, so while Puck does his thing, she gets a glass of red wine from the bar and makes small talk with some of the people she knows. They have a system for parties like these, so she keeps track of him, just like he knows he's doing for her, watching for the discreet hand gesture that means that one of them needs saving from a boring or uncomfortable conversation.

Puck breaks first, after about half an hour, and he catches her attention from across the room without even meeting her eyes. She excuses herself from her conversation and makes her way to where Puck is talking to a bald man who can only be described as portly. She circles around so she comes up from behind, slipping her arm around his waist. "There you are, honey" she interrupts, smiling up at him. "I've been looking everywhere for you." She glances at Baldy, widening her eyes a little as if she's only just noticed him. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt."

"That's all right," Baldy assures her. He shoots Puck a pointed look. "Noah, you didn't tell me that you had such a lovely wife."

"Thank you," Tina says sweetly before Puck can respond. The point of coming over here wasn't to get her dragged into the conversation along with him, so she says, "You don't mind if I steal him away, do you?"

"Of course not."

She waits patiently for Puck to shake Baldy's hand and exchange a few last pleasantries, then loops her arm through his and leads him away, stopping at the side of the room.

"Thank you," Puck says fervently, setting his hands on her hips when she turns to face him. "He was talking about his golf handicap."

Tina wrinkles her nose and rests her hands on his forearms. "It's a good thing I rescued you when I did, huh?" He hums his agreement, stroking his thumbs back and forth across her hipbones. She shoots him a warning glance. "Puck."

"Hmm?" He raises his eyebrows at her when she tightens her grip on his forearms. "How long do you think we have to stay at this thing?"

"It's your party," she points out, laughing.

He shakes his head. "I'm a Jew, baby. This doesn't have anything to do with me." She laughs in spite of herself and resists the urge to remind him, as if he's forgotten, that she's half-Jewish, too. "But seriously," he goes on. "We can cut out in like, ten minutes, right?"

"They're your co-workers," Tina says. "We can go whenever you want to go."

It's more like twenty minutes before they leave the restaurant, but they're in their bedroom within the hour, Puck's fingers skimming up her spine when he unclasps her bra.

"Please," she breathes out when he's teasing between her legs with the tips of his fingers, kissing across her chest the way he knows makes her crazy.

He nips at her collarbone "That guy called you my wife earlier," he murmurs against her skin. Her breath catches in her throat. "You didn't correct him."

She whispers his name, hoping that he'll stop talking but keep doing what he's doing. She wants him so badly.

He kisses along the side of her neck, his tongue darting out to taste her skin before he sucks gently at the spot just beneath her ear. "I want that, baby," he confesses, his breath hot against her ear. "So bad."

"Puck," she moans, and she couldn't stop it even if she wanted to.

It isn't the first time that he's said he wants to marry her, not by a long shot.

It is the first time that it's made her moan instead of breaking out in a cold sweat.

He pins her hands above her head when he (finally) pushes into her, and she's clutching at his fingers when she falls apart around him, practically whining his name when she feels him expand and let go inside her.

He doesn't bring it up again, but he's still holding her hand when she falls asleep, stroking his thumb against the inside of her third finger.

* * *

><p>Every winter that she lives here, Tina hates St. Louis more, even though she loves living here. You would think in a city this far north, people would know how to deal with a little bit of winter weather, but the second anything starts falling out of the sky, all sense of reason and any driving ability seems to disappear.<p>

It's her own fault that she's out in it. They've been talking about this storm all week, and when the freezing rain started at noon instead of late in the afternoon the way they'd predicted, she should have just scrapped her experiment, started her long weekend early, and worried about it when she got back into the lab on Monday. She knows that's what Puck did, because he caught her on g-chat before he left the arena to tell her that he was heading home and would see her there. Instead, she waited the forty-five minutes it took for the process to finish and was the last one out of the lab.

Of course, then she had to stop at the grocery store before she left Chesterfield to head back into the city to get potatoes to go with the pork tenderloin Puck is planning to cook for dinner to celebrate the beginning of Hanukkah. (It's a thing, and however inappropriate it is, she loves the guy, so she goes along with it.) She got caught up in the mass of people who are acting like a little ice and snow is going to trap them in their homes for a week, and by the time she got on the highway, it was a slick, horrible mess.

Oh, and she forgot to charge her phone last night, so it's playing the role of 'worthless piece of expensive plastic,' in her purse.

A commute that would normally take thirty minutes this time of day takes close to two hours, and then Tina slips and nearly breaks her neck trying to get up the sidewalk with two grocery bags and ten pounds of potatoes. When she's trudging up the stairs to the apartment, all she's thinking about is getting out of her jeans, which are now soaked at the hems, and into something more comfortable so she can spend the weekend cozied up with Puck. And possibly never driving anywhere again, though she knows that won't stick.

Puck isn't in the apartment when she lets herself in. She's immediately annoyed, because he always insists on driving around in crap like this just so he can see for himself how bad it is. It's a weird fascination that irritates her and worries her to death, but it doesn't seem to matter how many times she tells him that he's going to wreck his car or hurt himself, he keeps doing it.

This is different though. Puck drives on snow, but he usually stays away from the ice, and her stomach twists uncomfortably at the idea that he would have done something different today. She plugs her phone into her charger to check her messages; maybe he got hung up at work after he talked to her online earlier, or maybe he got caught up with something else.

She has one voice mail, a message from a harried-sounding man at Barnes Jewish hospital, telling her that he's calling on behalf of Noah Puckerman who was admitted to the emergency room following a car accident.

Tina takes exactly five seconds to shove the grocery bag that she knows has milk in it into the fridge, then she's back out the door, barely noticing the way that her feet slip on the sidewalk on her way to the car.

* * *

><p>A hospital emergency room during a winter storm is not a fun place to be.<p>

Tina spent most of the drive to the hospital - which took at least four times as long as it should have - wondering if she was going to have to fight with someone to convince them to give her information about Noah. Irrational, probably, since they called her, but still. She tried not to let herself think about what might have happened or what kind of condition he could be in, though she couldn't help thinking that he must not be doing well if they wouldn't let him call her himself. She tried to focus instead on keeping her car moving forward in her own lane and keeping an eye on the people around her who were driving like assholes. She knows herself, and if she let herself think too much, she was going to panic.

She's patient for as long as it takes the receptionists to deal with a man who is bleeding from his eyebrow, a woman with a baby who's wailing his head off, and a girl with a hugely swollen ankle, then she pushes her way to the front of the line prepared for an argument.

The man behind the desk just types Puck's name into his computer and tells her that he's still back in the emergency room, but that he's been cleared for release as soon as someone comes to transport him.

"That's me," Tina tells him furtively. "Tina Cohen-Chang. I just got the message that he was here, but I'm here to take him home now."

He nods kindly. "I understand. I'll let the nurse know that you're here, and someone will come and get you soon, okay?"

Tina nods, swallowing hard. "If I can take him home, that means he's okay, right?"

"I don't have any information here about what his condition is, but they wouldn't be planning to release him if he wasn't going to be all right." She supposes that makes sense. "Things are hectic, but someone will come and get you as soon as they can, I promise."

She nods again because it's apparently all she can do. "Thank you so much."

She takes a chair near swollen ankle girl and starts twisting the end of her scarf in her fingers. Knowing that he's going to be okay eases her mind a little, but it doesn't stop her from wondering what happened or what his condition is going to be when she finally gets to see him. There are at least two other hospitals between here and the arena, which makes her think that whatever happened must have happened when he was nearly home. She can't decide if that makes it better or worse. Then of course, is the matter of his car; where is it, and what condition is it in? She thinks that she should call his mother to let him know what happened, because even though he's an adult, it's still the sort of thing Mrs. Puckerman would want to know, but Tina's phone is lying on her bedside table at home, charging like it should have been last night.

She's trying to remember if she still has a spare ice scraper in the back floorboard of her car since she took her good one into the apartment with her when she got home earlier - it was still sleeting when she eased her car into an open space in the lot, and she may have to de-ice before she can go anywhere - when she hears someone saying Puck's name, which she assumes is her cue.

The nurse who leads her back into the emergency room area has menorahs on her scrubs, which seems both appropriate and very silly.

Puck is sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, the knot in his tie tugged loose, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and and his coat folded across the bed beside him. "Hey, baby," he greets simply when he sees her.

Tina swallows hard around the lump that's suddenly risen into her throat. "Are you okay?" The only thing she can see is a little bandage near the outer corner of his left eye, but that doesn't mean that he's okay. "My phone died, and I just got the message," she says before he has a chance to answer, stepping closer so she can touch him. She needs to touch him, so she traces the tips of her fingers above his left eyebrow.

"I would have called you myself, but they made me turn off my phone," he explains. He holds up his left hand to show her that his two middle fingers have been taped together. "I broke my finger and got two stitches in my face." She takes a deep breath. "But I'm okay. And so are you," he adds, reassuring. If he can tell that she's freaking out, she's doing a terrible job of holding it together. "They just finished stitching up my face like, ten minutes ago, so if you'd gotten here any sooner, you'd have just had to wait."

She takes his right hand in hers because she wants to be able to squeeze it without worrying about hurting him. "What happened?" It's just the first of several dozen questions she wants answers to.

He rolls his eyes. "Some jackass decided to try to use the second exit lane in this shit and forced me into the guardrail."

She lets out a breath. That isn't nearly as terrible as all of the things she was imagining while she was waiting to see him. "What about the car?"

"They towed it to a garage," he answers with a shrug. "That's why I ended up in the ambulance coming here. I won't know for sure till I get a chance to really look at it." He looks at her for a moment, and she watches his eyes get that little shine they get just before he says something tht could be construed as inappropriate. "You think my mom will forgive us for eating pork during Hanukkah if we tell her that I spent the first night in a Jewish hospital?"

Laughing dislodges that lump in her throat, along with a couple of stray tears that she manages to wipe away without Puck noticing because the doctor comes in to give him last-minute instructions, including signs to watch for that would indicate that he has a concussion. Tina doesn't say anything, but she doesn't think that she's going to have any problem keeping an eye on him for the rest of the night. She doesn't even want to step away from his side right now. She knows it's excessive, but she can't help how she feels.

"I don't have a concussion," Puck insists when they're walking across the parking lot. The sleet has switched to snow since she arrived at the hospital, and she watches a snowflake land on his eyelashes before he blinks it away. "I know what a concussion feels like."

"How many concussions have you had?"

"Three." Tina makes a strangled noise. "Baby, it's not a big deal."

She doesn't say anything, just lowers her head to protect her face from the snow when a gust of wind kicks up. She doesn't particularly want to think about her boyfriend's history of head injuries right now, even if it is her own fault for asking the question. Thinking about that makes her think about what could have happened if Puck's accident had been worse than just a broken finger and a couple of stitches.

What if it had been serious?

It bothers her all night. It bothers her when they light the menorah and when they're cooking dinner and when they're just sitting there on the sofa. Even though she knows rationally that Puck is okay - he's sitting beside her on the couch watching television while she pretends to read a book - she keeps imagining all the things that could have happened, all the ways that he could have been seriously injured or worse. What if he hadn't been wearing his seatbelt or if the other driver had been in a tractor-trailer? What if he'd broken a bone or sustained a real, severe head injury that meant that he would never be the same person again?

God, what if he'd been killed?

It's insane, torturing herself like this, and it makes her feel like a drama queen the likes of which she hasn't seen since she graduated from high school, but it's not like she's doing it deliberately. They're sitting close enough together that her knee brushes against his thigh when she shifts and pulls the throw blanket from the back of the sofa over her legs, but all she can think about is what it would be like if she didn't have him at all. What if the last words she'd ever spoken to him had been the _'It's because you're a bad Jew!'_ she'd called after him when he'd left the kitchen this morning asking why pigs were so delicious? (They'd been talking about their dinner plans, plans which have now been pushed back to tomorrow because neither of them had been interested in doing much in the way of cooking beyond heating up some of the beef stew Tina found buried in the freezer.)

She closes her book with a sigh when she realizes that she's just spent the last five minutes thinking about how awful it would be to have to be the one who called Puck's mother if something serious had happened to him.

"You all right?" he asks.

"Fine," she lies. She leans over to put her book on the end table. "I'm just tired. It's been a long day." She feels like she drove circles around the city thanks to the condition of the roads all day, and now it's as if she's running the emotional insanity equivalent of a marathon. She kisses his cheek and stands up. "I'm going to go wash my face."

It's the same as telling him that she's going to bed in fifteen minutes whether he comes or not, just like she does every night. And when she turns off the water after she finishes brushing her teeth, she can hear him moving through the apartment, turning off lights and checking the lock on the front door, just like he does every night. She knows that after she's finished, he'll slip into the bathroom to brush his teeth while she changes into her pajamas, and then they'll get into bed together and turn out the lights. It's routine, and she knows that it makes them boring, but she _likes_ it.

And now all she can think about is going to bed without him every night.

He waits until they're lying together in the dark to ask, "So, you wanna tell me what you've been thinking about all night?"

She sighs and turns towards him so she can peer at his face in the barely-there light. "Not really." He puts his hand on her arm under the covers. "I can't stop thinking about what it would be like if the accident had been worse and you weren't here," she admits.

"Like if I'd died?" he asks, sounding a little shocked. She nods. "Baby."

"I can't help it," she whispers.

He doesn't say anything else. He just gathers her into his arms, rolling onto his back and holding her against his chest so she can hear his heartbeat there.

They don't usually lie like this to fall asleep. Tina finds it difficult to fall asleep if it's too warm, and Puck's body is like a furnace, so they tend to stay on their respective sides of the bed. Tonight though, his warmth feels comforting instead of stifling, and it's the rhythm of his breathing that soothes her to sleep.

* * *

><p>Nelly is doing three concerts at the Scottrade Center just after New Year's, so while Tina is on vacation from work (the whole place shuts down for the week between Christmas and the new year), Puck is busy working to make sure that the rapper's big homecoming shows go off without any problems.<p>

Someday soon, Tina thinks, they need to go on a real vacation together, or even just take a long weekend in Chicago or Nashville or somewhere, just to be alone together. They haven't been able to get away from work together for more than a couple of days in nearly a year, and that was because they took a a week to go back to Lima for Tina's grandmother's eightieth birthday party.

For now, she's going to take advantage of a couple of days at home mostly to herself, using them to take down the holiday decorations and do some cleaning before she gets busy with work again and doesn't want to do much of anything when she gets home every night. It's a lot easier to get things like this done when she's alone, when she can turn on music and do things the way she likes them done without having to explain her system to Puck before she can get started. She loves him for wanting to do his share, but some things are just easier to do on your own.

She's standing on tiptoe, trying to push the storage bin of Hanukkah and Christmas decorations up onto the shelf of the closet in the spare bedroom when she somehow manages to dislodge a Halloween bin (yes, there's more than one bin of Halloween decorations; it is her favorite holiday to decorate for, after all) and send it crashing down on her head. It bounces off the door jamb before it hits the floor and pops open, scattering its contents across the hallway.

She's kneeling on the hardwood, checking to make sure that nothing was broken in the fall (fortunately, this isn't the bin with most of her glass candle holders), when her fingers close around the object that she's quite certain doesn't truly belong in the storage bin.

At least, she doesn't remember running across any little velvet boxes when she was packing away the Halloween decorations a couple of months ago.

She leaves the little box on the floor while she finishes packing away the spilled decorations and puts the bin back up on the shelf. She leaves it there when she closes the closet door and goes into the kitchen to wash her hands, which feel dusty and grimy even though none of the things she's been touching were either of those things. She leaves it there when she turns off the music that she had playing and makes herself some coffee.

She carries her mug with her when she goes back into the spare bedroom to look at the box, still sitting there on the floor just to the left of the closet door. And the box is still sitting there on the floor when she carried her coffee back into the kitchen so she can top it up with Bailey's because she needs _something_ and whiskey just doesn't go with amaretto-flavored non-dairy creamer.

As sure as she is that she's just discovered an engagement ring that was meant to stay hidden, she can't bring herself to open the box and confirm her suspicion.

She knows that Puck wants to be married, and what's more, she knows that he wants to be married to _her_. That sounds silly, but it's an important distinction. If he didn't want her, he would have left a long time ago to find another woman willing to marry him. Tina doesn't doubt that Puck would be able to find that woman, and that she, whoever she was, would be lucky to have him.

She also knows that things have been changing between them in the last several months. Her reaction to this is a testament to that. If she'd found this box - this box that's she's quite sure holds ane engagement ring - this time last year, she would have panicked. She certainly wouldn't be sitting on the end of the bed staring at it, considering what it means.

When Puck gets home from work, she and the box have moved. She's on the sofa, and it's on the coffee table, perched atop the black lacquered box that hides the remote controls when they aren't using them.

"Hey, baby," he greets, just like every day, oblivious to what's going on. He's already set his bag down and is shrugging out of his coat when he realizes that the way that she's sitting there, silent, isn't normal. "What's going on?"

She sees his face change when he sees the little box sitting there. He swallows hard, draping his coat over the back of the armchair, then he takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. "Tina-"

"I haven't looked inside," she interrupts before he can try to explain. She didn't mean to wait so long to say something, but her voice didn't want to work properly when she wanted it to. "I don't know what's in the box," she goes on when she's sure that he's paying attention. "I found it by accident, and I've been thinking about it all afternoon. I realized something."

She rises and goes to stand in front of him because she just isn't close enough. "It doesn't matter what's in the box, Puck. I love you. I want to be with you, and the idea of being without you makes me..." she trails off, not sure exactly what word goes there. She just hates the idea of being without him. "Getting married is just another way of saying that I want to be with you forever, and since I already feel that way, why shouldn't we?" Her heart is beating so fast that she can hear the blood pounding in her ears.

Puck looks at her carefully for a moment, then asks, "Did you just propose to me?"

The laughter that bubbles out is a combination of things that Tina doesn't even have a name for. "I guess I did."

He puts his hands on her cheeks and kisses her hard, one hand slipping into her hair when he pulls back just a bit. "I wanna marry you, baby," he murmurs, leaning in to kiss her again. "I love you."

(Later, Puck leaves her alone in bed naked to retrieve the little box from where it's still sitting on the coffee table. Inside is a pair of opal earrings, _your birthday present, but I guess you kind of blew that,_ Puck says when she's standing in front of the mirror putting them on. Somehow, knowing that he still hadn't gotten her a ring makes their engagement feel sweeter.

And now, for the rest of their lives, they can tell the story of how she was the one to propose to him.)


End file.
